Windows, Mac: There’s something delightful about the old LucasArts ScummVM games: The beautiful environments, the crafty puzzles and the incredible voice-overs (for the games that weren’t just text captions over moving mouths).
I keep a few installed on my desktop in case I ever need a quick fix of Stan the Salesman, if I ever want to get pummelled, or if I ever need to spend hours on some Day of the Tentacle puzzles — the silly sequel to the beloved Maniac Mansion game from the late 1980s.
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I was delighted to see last week that a group of fans have created their own version of Day of the Tentacle — technically, a sequel to the sequel — called Return of the Tentacle. It’s completely free to download and play for Windows and Mac, and you can even grab the game’s soundtrack as a separate download (if you need that Day of the Tentacle fix during your morning commute).
The best part? It looks just as good as the last official game in the franchise. As Return of the Tentacle’s creators describe:
Hunt down megalomaniacal Tentacles, have bizarre conversations and solve crazy puzzles. Bernard, Hoagie and Laverne roam hand-drawn locations filled with elaborately animated characters and atmospheric music and sounds. We have done everything possible in order to capture the atmosphere and the humour of the old classic and carry it into the 21st Century.
Once you’ve gotten yourself hooked on Return of the Tentacle, there are plenty of places you can play more old-school ScummVM titles for free. Obviously, downloading ScummVM is your first step. After that, there are plenty of free titles and demos you can try, if you don’t feel like extracting the classic contents of games such as The Secret of Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle and playing them in ScummVM directly.
Heck, you can even play some ScummVM games directly in your web browser — even the old-school Sierra titles, too.
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